Current theories of enacted and embedded cognition emphasize that cognitive processes occur through a person’s interaction with the environment: gadgets, notebooks, photo albums, other people, and communities. Traumatic interpersonal and political experiences entail conscious and unconscious changes in these relationships, which can be characterized medically as manifestations of mental disorders. Through a series of phenomenological interviews with political migrants, I show that painful political experiences are depressive experiences in their proper sense and not just ‘social contexts of illness’. Accordingly, mental health care professionals should take this experience into careful consideration and treat it as the first person account of mental disorder.